29 November: Digital Pedagogies

I work in a very hands-on area of study so naturally I have a hard time finding too many forms of digital teaching relevant. While the interwebs can be useful for helping students remember techniques that they've learnt in the workshop, the practical learning usually needs to happen in-house, in person, with steel toed boots on.

The timing of the Balkanized Internet article couldn't be more relevant. Just as the American FCC moves to make Internet access more expensive, more limited, and more specifically-oriented toward websites and services that are profitable for the ISP (regardless of their utility to or desirability for consumers) we are reminded that access to Internet and computing hardware is already polarised and becoming more so as ISPs limit access to the cables themselves to the poor, the rural, and the already-underserved. Of course!

Okay, Marc Prensky's Natives-Immigrants article is downright obscene. This Web 1.0 guy from 2001 pretending that his students are digital natives because they watched MTV? He was a passive consumer of TV from childhood just like everyone else.  That making people play games to learn key skills, try to piece together learning out of hundreds of thirty-second sound bytes, and tolerate advice from an anthropomorphous paper clip was going to benefit more than four per cent of the population? Oh man. I've got a skill you might try to teach over the 'net, but probably shouldn't. We've learned that you really shouldn't have your only skills training for power tools come from videos. At the very least, if you're going to learn how to use your circular saw from YouTube make sure your flatmate is a First Aider. Or at least has an ambulance on speed dial. Oh the digital millennium. How clever we all thought we were.

I'm on board with the Critical Digital Pedagogy article's crux--the interwebs, the computers, the VoIP and video conferencing--these things are tools that can either facilitate or support learning. Ultimately we still learn the way we always did, but now we can do it from further away, or at least in the comfort of our own homes. For some things. If we want to.